Just gotta say, playing the alpha and watching the recent streams has really brought back a lot of the faith I used to have in you guys. Anthem looks on-track to be fantastic.

That being said, I agree that even just re-rolling a single inscription per gear piece a la Diablo 3 would go a long way toward making progression a an even better experience, and it looks pretty darn good as is. Thanks for hearing us!

The sheer fact that they are here monitoring feedback already and being open about it is restoring my faith in the Gaming Industry in general. Not going to go into all the details but the latest trends of certain game companies has had me pretty bummed lately and it's starting to look like BioWare may sweep in and take this genre by storm and have created something that we can all enjoy for a long time. I sure hope so anyway.

Please look into the history of The Division and Diablo 3. They had very similar loot systems with random rolls when they launched and it nearly killed their games because it was so extremely punishing. You never knew what you were going to get. It made planning out builds nearly impossible because you had so much overlap in random rolls. Both of those games had to perform a complete overhaul of their loot sytems to make it even remotely worth players time.

That right there should be the biggest motivator for /u/BenIrvo and the dev team, given they have said multiple times that they really really want to build a community that fosters posting different builds and sharing them.

Ben has of course come out and said they are open to having a reroll system, which is great, but I would make the case that this should be made that this should be a patch-as-soon-as-possible thing, before people get to endgame, which is when builds will start to develop. Having items that drop with completely random affixes that you can't even slightly alter is directly antithetical to a community that shares builds. Being able to craft items over and over is fine, but it's really the dropped items here that will be the enthusiasm killer.

Take a prime example: the Guard Up decoration in Monster Hunter World. Less than a 1% drop rate, no way to craft it, but completely build-defining because it allows shielded players to tank a large number of attacks that could not be tanked without it (and would send the player flying instead of standing their ground). It's an extremely popular build regardless, because it allows for a slow & methodical takedown of nearly any monster in the game. If that's the kind of playstyle you want, and you see all these awesome Guard Up builds online that you want to try, you'd best hope that you get one to drop (and I'm 300 hours in and have never seen one drop).

What could arise in Anthem is a similar but not identical situation --- a Jyura's Wrath may drop, and it has that build-defining affix, but it doesn't roll with +assault rifle damage, which then makes your build feel like a neutered version of "the real one" that some Youtuber got. The problem is then multiplicative if you're relying on stacking a stat, such as +flight time. Somebody who got great rolls on their masterworks might be able to fly nearly indefinitely, whereas you were unlucky and didn't roll any on your masterworks, and all those pieces of gear may have taken two weeks of nightly farming to luck into. Or, let's say someone gets multiple +rifle dmg inscriptions on their things whereas you got none; you could get in a situation where you have the same gear score/rarity of items as one person, but they are dealing a significant amount more damage than you due to being lucky enough to stack +dmg inscriptions.

Ben, you're a stud. Thanks for replying to all these important issues that the community wants a voice for. I know there can be a lot of loud negative feedback, but the way you are presenting the game is absolutely setting the right expectations for what the game actually is. Thanks again.

Not all items are craftable. This feedback/issue being raised has always been about items that you can't target, i.e. dropped items. Crafted items yeah sure, craft as much as you want, but if you want to build around an item that only drops in the world (no specific bosses or missions drop specific items, this has already been confirmed), then the amount of RNG involved skyrockets. To get that item from a random drop, and realize it has crap affixes that you can't even at least slightly change, that is not good gameplay.

Thanks for the response Ben, but since divorcing ourselves from anthem discussion having written it off since that stream solely due to this reason, my mates and I will be giving anthem a miss as our group agrees that this will absolutely murder what would've been a good endgame. I only saw this having googled "anthem reroll inscriptions" today out of curiosity to see if there was a response. I urge you in the strongest terms to keep this in mind because the success of your game is going to come down to that endgame, and some form of control over that ludicrously broad RNG is absolutely necessary. All the best with launch though. No salt here, just disappointment.

Ok, sorry, I just figured that given the time this has been in development, most of it would have been mostly finished like last year, and the rest of this year was more in polishing and balancing it to make sure that it was working at 100% well before launch, and then the last few months would be more about iterating on feedback and building post-launch content.

Launch less than 3 months away and the AI is still pretty poorly programmed, AI disappears off screen, and the build they showed on stream last week didn't even work + the weapon didn't work either...

Clearly well behind on things and your assumption is completely the ideal process. Lol i don't know why ppl down voted you. Lol it's almost like they just like to kiss ass instead of give a true critique. Are graphics anywhere near what they showed in there live demos btw? Am i the only one that thinks actual footage and stream footage are nowhere near the public demo footage.

On the topic of Randomized stats.... Stats that aren't rerollable is garbage and that's common knowledge to any gamer lol. So it seems priorities are all over the place. At that point just add in microtransactions to buy your rolls. EA got them leashed up tightly in a collar anyway right? I quit monster Hunter on the sole reason of loot drop percentages. And so did allot of others. Imagine farming for a random gun drop that comes with random stats. Lol honestly just make the best gear all craftable that comes from the hardest content. Should be the route they should take.

Eh anyway i like your comment because it's totally a viable response. Not hard to add a rerollable mechanic in the game. They just don't have any time for it clearly because the stuff that is supposed to work obviously isn't.